About locations

You can assign a location to the PingDirectoryProxy server and each of the backend LDAP external servers for routing requests and failover response preferences.

Locations define a group of servers with similar response time characteristics. Each location consists of a name and an ordered list of preferred failover locations. These locations can determine how to route requests so that the server forwards requests to the PingDirectoryProxy server in the same data center over those in remote locations.

For example, a deployment consists of three data centers, one in New York, one in Chicago, and one in Los Angeles. In the New York data center, applications that reside in this data center prefer communicating with directories in this data center. If none of the servers are available, it prefers to failover to the data center in Chicago rather than the data center in Los Angeles, so the New York location contains an ordered list in which the Chicago location is preferred over the Los Angeles data center for failover.

Follow these guidelines for assigning locations in the PingDirectoryProxy server:

If you have multiple data centers, assign a separate location for each one.
In most environments, all PingDirectoryProxy server instances should have the same configuration except for the attribute that specifies the location of the server itself.

Learn more about Configuring locations.